How can I tell if I’ve been shadowbanned? What is shadowbanning even?
So, a lot of people on Twitter now are getting “shadowbanned”, and I see many people on my timeline wondering how this works, how you can tell if it happened to you, and just what shadowbanning even is. So here’s a quick guide.
“Shadowbanning” (when referencing Twitter that is) is a term coined to describe a poorly understood aspect of Twitter that sometimes affects accounts, and which is probably related to some anti-spam feature of Twitter. I say “probably” because Twitter is completely silent and unhelpful about this issue, so we’re all just guessing here.
If an account is shadowbanned, then it means some combination of the following three things will be affecting the account.
1) Their tweets won’t show up in searches anymore.
Do you know you can search for tweets from specific users? This is useful for seeing if an account has been shadowbanned. For example, you can type “from:madscientist212″ in the twitter search bar, or simply click this link.
As of the time I’m writing this, I am not shadowbanned, so you should see something like this:
On the other hand, if an account has been shadowbanned, the results will be something like this:
Interestingly enough, there are some accounts that don’t seem to show up in searches, but which have none of the other aspects of a shadowban. I do not know why this is the case. These accounts seem pretty rare though, so if you don’t show up in searches, there’s a very good chance you have other aspects of being shadowbanned as well.
Speaking of other aspects of being shadowbanned...
2) Tweets will not show up in Notifications, even the Notifications of a mutual.
This is probably the worst aspect of being shadowbanned. No one will see any mentions or other notifications from such an account.
Now, when I say they won’t “see” them, I mean that they won’t show up on the notification tab, and there won’t be any number indicator added to the notification bell showing that there’s a new notification.
But, if you follow someone who has been shadowbanned, you’ll still see their tweets on your main timeline. So if they @ you, then you might still see the tweet there. You just won’t ever be notified about it, so if you miss the tweet on your main timeline, then you’ll never know.
Which is extremely frustrating. I follow a lot of people on Twitter, and I know I’m not the only one. Tons of tweets go by my timeline every day that I never see. I rely on the Notification tab and notice to see who is trying to talk to me. If that gets taken away, communication breaks down.
And if you’re shadowbanned and you don’t know it, you might be wondering just why everyone is ignoring you and not responding to anything you say. It’s nothing personal. They just aren’t seeing it.
Testing this aspect is a bit tougher than the first. You need to get your followers to help you out, and see if they can see you in their notifications. Of course, if they CAN’T see you in their notifications, getting their attention in the first place is gonna be a lot harder.
Also, this is apparently sometimes inconsistent, so you might have some accounts getting notifications from you, and some not. Joy of joys!
There’s one other aspect of being shadowbanned, which a lot of the recent accounts suffering from this don’t actually seem to have. Again, no idea why.
3) Tweets will not thread properly. Tweets threads will break down, and replies will appear to be replies to nothing.
As I said, a lot of the accounts I’m seeing shadowbanned today don’t have this aspect. In the past though, this seemed to be the case for every shadowbanned account.
It also seems inconsistent right now. In one case, someone who was shadowbanned had her tweets show up as replies properly for me and herself, but NOT for someone else.
I’d say that to test this is easy, all you have to do is click on one of your individual tweets that’s a reply and see if it shows what it’s a response to, like so:
But since it’s inconsistent, actually, that doesn’t matter. If I was shadowbanned, I might look at this tweet and have it show up like this, but someone else might look at it, and be unable to see Jake’s tweet, making it seem like I replied to a deleted tweet or something.
So that’s it. That’s what it means to be shadowbanned. Some further info:
So why the hell is Twitter doing this?
No idea. The best guess, based on the fact that a lot of the early accounts noticed to be shadowbanned were bot accounts, is that this is some sort of anti-spam feature. But it seems to be affecting a ton of accounts now, including accounts that seem unlikely to trigger some anti-spam algorithm, and which are also unlikely to have somehow gotten a pissed off mob falsely reporting them for spam.
It would be helpful if Twitter actually explained anything about this, but this is Twitter we’re talking about.
How long has this been happening?
Don’t know, but for quite a while actually. I first noticed a shadowban affecting an anime picture bot account back in March 2016. I had never encountered anything like it before, and was incredibly baffled by it. When I tweeted at the bot owner, they said it happened a lot, and there was nothing they could do about it. It was best to just wait a while for it to wear off again.
They didn’t say how long it had been happening, but I got the impression for a while, so I’d say there’s a good chance Twitter has been doing this for at least a couple years.
However, at first, it seemed to be a fairly rare thing, mostly affecting bot accounts that tweeted often and which automatically replied to certain tweets. Now, though, that’s not the case. If this is the result of some anti-spam algorithm, then clearly Twitter has been making adjustments to it, and as now completely borked it.
Hopefully this will provide some helpful info on the subject. There’s been a lot of confusion about this, as well as bizarre conspiracy theories, so I was hoping to be able to clear the air a bit.
